Album Artist Tagging and Flac Problem

[Ikrananka]

Two main issues for me:

1. Flac Files and Album Artist Tag Recognition

Although the WinAmp media library is now supposed to support Album Artist tagging it is not working for my Flac media files. These have been tagged using the popular Tag&Rename software which uses the ALBUMARTIST tag. This format of album artist tag does not appear to be read by the WinAmp media library.

My Sonos music system (www.sonos.com) reads all of my album artist tags fine. It supports the following formats:

Album Artist
AlbumArtist
Ensemble

I know that there is no universal standard that is being used by everyone for Flac tagging and as such it is important for WinAmp to support several album artist variants. Can we please see WinAmp support for Flac album artist tags be extended to include say the above three variants.

2. Use Artist as Album Artist if not available

This new option does not work for me. As described above my album artist tags are not being read and so my album artist listing is empty in media library. If I select "Use Artist as Album Artist if not available" the album artist listing is still empty. In v5.33 the album artist list was filled with ALL artists. In both cases they are reading the same media files.

[DJ Egg]

1. Tag & Rename writes Album Artist to the Ensemble field, not albumartist.

As you said, AlbumArtist is a custom field, ie. non-standard, so there's nothing written in stone to say who is right or wrong. Tag+Rename could also write to the albumartist field, Winamp could also read the ensemble field, but currently neither one does.

2. That option needs to be enabled prior to importing the files into the ml database. If enabling it after importing, then you'll need to do 'read metadata on selected items' (via the right-click menu in the Tracks pane) for AlbumArtist=Artist to be written to the mldb only (ie. not the tags).

[Ikrananka]

Thanks for your quick reply DJ Egg.

1. Tag & Rename writes Album Artist to the Ensemble field, not albumartist.
In fact we're both wrong. I have just checked my flac files using metaflac and found that Tag & Rename writes to the ENSEMBLE field. I reiterate that with the lack of any consistency in flac tagging that WinAmp should support several variants for the Album Artist tag - is this forum the right place to make such requests?

2. That option needs to be enabled prior to importing the files into the ml database. If enabling it after importing, then you'll need to do 'read metadata on selected items' (via the right-click menu in the Tracks pane) for AlbumArtist=Artist to be written to the mldb only (ie. not the tags).
Selecting the 'read metadata on selected items' in the track pane sure does show the Album Artist in the track pane. However, the Album Artist pane still shows zero album artists. Oh well, I'll re-index my whole collection with the "Use Artist as Album Artist if not available" selected.